Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction. However, practical dLLM decoding still suffers from high inference latency, which limits deployment. In this work, we observe that a substantial part of this inefficiency comes from recurring redundancy in the decoding process, including spatial redundancy caused by confidence clusters and positional ambiguity, and temporal redundancy caused by repeatedly remasking predictions that have already stabilized. Motivated by these patterns, we propose $R^{2}$-dLLM, a unified framework for reducing decoding redundancy from both inference and training perspectives. At inference time, we introduce training-free decoding rules that aggregate local confidence and token predictions, and finalize temporally stable tokens to avoid redundant decoding steps. We further propose a redundancy-aware supervised fine-tuning pipeline that aligns the model with efficient decoding trajectories and reduces reliance on manually tuned thresholds. Experiments demonstrate that $R^{2}$-dLLM consistently reduces the number of decoding steps by up to 88\% compared to existing decoding strategies, while maintaining competitive generation quality across different models and tasks. These results validate that decoding redundancy is a central bottleneck in dLLMs, and that explicitly reducing it yields substantial practical efficiency gains. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/R2-dLLM.

Recently impressive performance has been achieved in Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) by utilizing the image-text alignment learned by a large pre-trained vision-language model (i.e. CLIP). However, there exist two key limitations in concept modeling. Existing methods often suffer from pre-training biases, manifested as granularity misalignment or reliance on structural priors. Moreover, fine-tuning with Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss treats each concept independently, which ignores mutual exclusivity among concepts, leading to suboptimal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose Concept-wise Attention for Fine-grained Concept Bottleneck Models (CoAt-CBM), a novel framework that achieves adaptive fine-grained image-concept alignment and high interpretability. Specifically, CoAt-CBM employs learnable concept-wise visual queries to adaptively obtain fine-grained concept-wise visual embeddings, which are then used to produce a concept score vector. Then, a novel concept contrastive optimization guides the model to handle the relative importance of the concept scores, enabling concept predictions to faithfully reflect the image content and improved alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoAt-CBM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The codes will be available upon acceptance.

Text production (and translations) proceeds in the form of stretches of typing, interrupted by keystroke pauses. It is often assumed that fast typing reflects unchallenged/automated translation production while long(er) typing pauses are indicative of translation problems, hurdles or difficulties. Building on a long discussion concerning the determination of pause thresholds that separate automated from presumably reflective translation processes (O'Brien, 2006; Alves and Vale, 2009; Timarova et al., 2011; Dragsted and Carl, 2013; Lacruz et al., 2014; Kumpulainen, 2015; Heilmann and Neumann 2016), this paper compares five approaches for computing these pause thresholds, and suggest and evaluate a novel method for computing Production Unit Breaks.

While automated sleep staging has achieved expert-level accuracy, its clinical adoption is hindered by a lack of auditable reasoning. We introduce SleepVLM, a rule-grounded vision-language model (VLM) that stages sleep from multi-channel polysomnography (PSG) waveform images and generates clinician-readable rationales based on American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) scoring criteria. Utilizing waveform-perceptual pre-training and rule-grounded supervised fine-tuning, SleepVLM achieved Cohen's kappa of 0.767 on a held-out test set (MASS-SS1) and 0.743 on an external cohort (ZUAMHCS), matching state-of-the-art performance. Independent expert evaluation by two trained sleep technologists further validated the model's reasoning quality, with mean scores of 3.75-3.96 out of 5 across factual accuracy, evidence comprehensiveness, and logical coherence on both datasets. By coupling competitive performance with transparent, rule-based explanations, SleepVLM may improve the trustworthiness and auditability of automated sleep staging in clinical workflows. To facilitate further research in interpretable sleep medicine, we release MASS-EX, a novel expert-annotated dataset.

This paper introduces the L-ReLF (Low-Resource Lexical Framework), a novel, reproducible methodology for creating high-quality, structured lexical datasets for underserved languages. The lack of standardized terminology, exemplified by Moroccan Darija, poses a critical barrier to knowledge equity in platforms like Wikipedia, often forcing editors to rely on inconsistent, ad-hoc methods to create new words in their language. Our research details the technical pipeline developed to overcome these challenges. We systematically address the difficulties of working with low-resource data, including source identification, utilizing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) despite its bias towards Modern Standard Arabic, and rigorous post-processing to correct errors and standardize the data model. The resulting structured dataset is fully compatible with Wikidata Lexemes, serving as a vital technical resource. The L-ReLF methodology is designed for generalizability, offering other language communities a clear path to build foundational lexical data for downstream NLP applications, such as Machine Translation and morphological analysis.

In this paper, we introduce NAS3R, a self-supervised feed-forward framework that jointly learns explicit 3D geometry and camera parameters with no ground-truth annotations and no pretrained priors. During training, NAS3R reconstructs 3D Gaussians from uncalibrated and unposed context views and renders target views using its self-predicted camera parameters, enabling self-supervised training from 2D photometric supervision. To ensure stable convergence, NAS3R integrates reconstruction and camera prediction within a shared transformer backbone regulated by masked attention, and adopts a depth-based Gaussian formulation that facilitates well-conditioned optimization. The framework is compatible with state-of-the-art supervised 3D reconstruction architectures and can incorporate pretrained priors or intrinsic information when available. Extensive experiments show that NAS3R achieves superior results to other self-supervised methods, establishing a scalable and geometry-aware paradigm for 3D reconstruction from unconstrained data. Code and models are publicly available at https://ranrhuang.github.io/nas3r/.

Causal forests estimate how treatment effects vary across individuals, guiding personalized interventions in areas like marketing, operations, and public policy. A standard practice is honest estimation: dividing the data into two samples, one to define subgroups and another to estimate treatment effects within them. This is intended to reduce overfitting and is the default in many software packages. But is it the right choice? We show that honest estimation can reduce the accuracy of estimates of individual treatment effects, especially when effect heterogeneity is substantial and datasets are large enough to detect it. The reason is a bias-variance trade-off: honesty lowers the risk of overfitting but increases the risk of underfitting by limiting the data available to detect and model heterogeneity. Across more than 7,000 benchmark datasets, we find that the cost of using honesty by default can be as high as requiring 27% more data to match the performance of models trained without it. Honesty is best understood as a form of regularization. Whether to adopt it should depend on the goals of the application and its empirical performance, not on reflexive default use.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of end-to-end neural networks by introducing a layer of concepts and predicting the class label from the concept predictions. A key property of CBMs is that they support interventions, i.e., domain experts can correct mispredicted concept values at test time to improve the final accuracy. However, typical CBMs apply interventions by overwriting only the corrected concept while leaving other concept predictions unchanged, which ignores causal dependencies among concepts. To address this, we propose the Causal Neural Probabilistic Circuit (CNPC), which combines a neural attribute predictor with a causal probabilistic circuit compiled from a causal graph. This circuit supports exact, tractable causal inference that inherently respects causal dependencies. Under interventions, CNPC models the class distribution based on a Product of Experts (PoE) that fuses the attribute predictor's predictive distribution with the interventional marginals computed by the circuit. We theoretically characterize the compositional interventional error of CNPC w.r.t. its modules and identify conditions under which CNPC closely matches the ground-truth interventional class distribution. Experiments on five benchmark datasets in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings show that, compared with five baseline models, CNPC achieves higher task accuracy across different numbers of intervened attributes.

Sub-bit model compression targets storage below one bit per weight; as magnitudes are aggressively compressed, the sign bit becomes a fixed-cost bottleneck. Across Transformers, CNNs, and MLPs, learned sign matrices resist low-rank approximation and are spectrally indistinguishable from an i.i.d. Rademacher baseline. This randomness gives rise to the lower bound of sub-bit model compression -- the one-bit wall. Despite this apparent randomness, most weights retain their initialization signs; flips primarily occur via rare near-zero boundary crossings, suggesting that sign-pattern randomness is largely inherited from initialization. We formalize this behavior with sign lock-in theory, a stopping-time analysis of sign flips under SGD noise. Under bounded updates and a rare re-entry condition into a small neighborhood of zero, the number of effective sign flips exhibits a geometric tail. Building on this mechanism, we introduce a from-scratch low-rank sign-template training method that prevents the emergence of this one-bit wall.

We propose UniDFlow, a unified discrete flow-matching framework for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing. It decouples understanding and generation via task-specific low-rank adapters, avoiding objective interference and representation entanglement, while a novel reference-based multimodal preference alignment optimizes relative outcomes under identical conditioning, improving faithfulness and controllability without large-scale retraining. UniDFlpw achieves SOTA performance across eight benchmarks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to tasks including inpainting, in-context image generation, reference-based editing, and compositional generation, despite no explicit task-specific training.

Model soups are strange and strangely effective combinations of parameters. They take a model (the stock), fine-tune it into multiple models (the ingredients), and then mix their parameters back into one model (the soup) to improve predictions. While all known soups require supervised learning, and optimize the same loss on labeled data, our recipes for Self-Soupervision generalize soups to self-supervised learning (SSL). Our Self-Souping lets us flavor ingredients on new data sources, e.g. from unlabeled data from a task for transfer or from a shift for robustness. We show that Self-Souping on corrupted test data, then fine-tuning back on uncorrupted train data, boosts robustness by +3.5% (ImageNet-C) and +7% (LAION-C). Self-Soupervision also unlocks countless SSL algorithms to cook the diverse ingredients needed for more robust soups. We show for the first time that ingredients can differ in their SSL hyperparameters -- and more surprisingly, in their SSL algorithms. We cook soups of MAE, MoCoV3, MMCR, and LeJEPA ingredients that are more accurate than any single SSL ingredient.

This work studies online episodic tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) with known transitions and develops best-of-both-worlds algorithms that achieve refined data-dependent regret bounds in the adversarial regime and variance-dependent regret bounds in the stochastic regime. We quantify MDP complexity using a first-order quantity and several new data-dependent measures for the adversarial regime, including a second-order quantity and a path-length measure, as well as variance-based measures for the stochastic regime. To adapt to these measures, we develop algorithms based on global optimization and policy optimization, both built on optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader with log-barrier regularization. For global optimization, our algorithms achieve first-order, second-order, and path-length regret bounds in the adversarial regime, and in the stochastic regime, they achieve a variance-aware gap-independent bound and a variance-aware gap-dependent bound that is polylogarithmic in the number of episodes. For policy optimization, our algorithms achieve the same data- and variance-dependent adaptivity, up to a factor of the episode horizon, by exploiting a new optimistic $Q$-function estimator. Finally, we establish regret lower bounds in terms of data-dependent complexity measures for the adversarial regime and a variance measure for the stochastic regime, implying that the regret upper bounds achieved by the global-optimization approach are nearly optimal.

Personalized and continuous interactions are critical for LLM-based conversational agents, yet finite context windows and static parametric memory hinder the modeling of long-term, cross-session user states. Existing approaches, including retrieval-augmented generation and explicit memory systems, primarily operate at the fact level, making it difficult to distill stable preferences and deep user traits from evolving and potentially conflicting dialogues.To address this challenge, we propose RGMem, a self-evolving memory framework inspired by the renormalization group (RG) perspective on multi-scale organization and emergence. RGMem models long-term conversational memory as a multi-scale evolutionary process: episodic interactions are transformed into semantic facts and user insights, which are then progressively integrated through hierarchical coarse-graining, thresholded updates, and rescaling into a dynamically evolving user profile.By explicitly separating fast-changing evidence from slow-varying traits and enabling non-linear, phase-transition-like dynamics, RGMem enables robust personalization beyond flat retrieval or static summarization. Extensive experiments on the LOCOMO and PersonaMem benchmarks demonstrate that RGMem consistently outperforms SOTA memory systems, achieving stronger cross-session continuity and improved adaptation to evolving user preferences. Code is available at https://github.com/fenhg297/RGMem

Geographic data is fundamentally local. Disease outbreaks cluster in population centers, ecological patterns emerge along coastlines, and economic activity concentrates within country borders. Machine learning models that encode geographic location, however, distribute representational capacity uniformly across the globe, struggling at the fine-grained resolutions that localized applications require. We propose a geographic location encoder built from spherical Slepian functions that concentrate representational capacity inside a region-of-interest and scale to high resolutions without extensive computational demands. For settings requiring global context, we present a hybrid Slepian-Spherical Harmonic encoder that efficiently bridges the tradeoff between local-global performance, while retaining desirable properties such as pole-safety and spherical-surface-distance preservation. Across five tasks spanning classification, regression, and image-augmented prediction, Slepian encodings outperform baselines and retain performance advantages across a wide range of neural network architectures.

Large-scale foundation models (FMs) in remote sensing (RS) (denoted as RS FMs) are developed following paradigms established in computer vision (CV), yet the validity of transferring CV scaling laws to RS has not been systematically examined. We hypothesize that RS FMs enter an overparameterized regime at substantially smaller scales than their CV counterparts, with task-relevant information encoded redundantly across model dimensions. To test this hypothesis, we apply post-hoc slimmability, uniform width reduction of pretrained encoder transformer blocks, as a tool to measure representational redundancy across eight state-of-the-art RS FMs on classification, segmentation, and change detection tasks. RS FMs retain 69% to 109% relative accuracy on RS datasets under aggressive width reduction, while masked autoencoder (MAE) and DINOv2 pretrained on natural images (denoted as CV MAE and CV DINOv2) degrade sharply on ImageNet subsets of matched class count over the same range of computational requirements. A CV MAE evaluated directly on the same RS datasets narrows but does not close the gap, indicating that both dataset characteristics and domain-specific pretraining contribute to the differences between the models. Mechanistic analyses such as feature correlation, explained variance, and effective dimensionality indicate that task-relevant variance concentrates in few principal components and is redundantly encoded across model dimensions. We further show that learned slimmable training improves over post-hoc slimmability for contrastive objectives, while reconstruction-based objectives do not benefit from current slimmable training protocols. Our findings establish post-hoc slimming as a practical deployment strategy for resource-constrained RS applications and as a diagnostic tool for representational redundancy in RS FMs. Upon acceptance, we will publish all code.

Query-based universal sound separation is fundamental to intelligent auditory systems, aiming to isolate specific sources from mixtures. Despite recent advances, existing methods continue to suffer from residual interference in complex acoustic scenes. This performance limitation stems largely from a data bottleneck: in-the-wild datasets contain weak labels and severe co-occurrence of events. These flaws induce models to learn spurious correlations between background noise and target categories instead of robust acoustic features. To address this, we propose an automated pipeline that eliminates co-occurrence of events by mining high-purity single-event segments from in-the-wild datasets via a semantically consistent synthesis protocol. Utilizing this pipeline, we constructed Hive, a high-quality synthetic dataset comprising 2.4k hours of raw audio. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art model SAM-Audio which was trained on a huge dataset $\sim$500 times larger than Hive, certain open-source models trained on Hive achieve competitive separation accuracy and perceptual quality. Moreover, these models exhibited remarkable zero-shot generalization on out-of-distribution evaluation benchmarks. These findings highlight that prioritizing purity of supervised signals enables significant data efficiency, offering a new paradigm for training robust auditory foundation models with reduced computational costs. Code and dataset are available at https://cslikai.cn/Hive.

Robot manipulation has increasingly adopted data-driven generative policy frameworks, yet the field faces a persistent trade-off: diffusion models suffer from high inference latency, while flow-based methods often require complex architectural constraints. Although in image generation domain, the MeanFlow paradigm offers a path to single-step inference, its direct application to robotics is impeded by critical theoretical pathologies, specifically spectral bias and gradient starvation in low-velocity regimes. To overcome these limitations, we propose the One-step MeanFlow Policy (OMP), a novel framework designed for high-fidelity, real-time manipulation. We introduce a lightweight directional alignment mechanism to explicitly synchronize predicted velocities with true mean velocities. Furthermore, we implement a Differential Derivation Equation (DDE) to approximate the Jacobian-Vector Product (JVP) operator, which decouples forward and backward passes to significantly reduce memory complexity. Extensive experiments on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate that OMP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in success rate and trajectory accuracy, particularly in high-precision tasks, while retaining the efficiency of single-step generation.

Hallucination is a central failure mode of language models (LMs). We focus on hallucinations in response to questions like: "Which instrument did Glenn Gould play?", but we ask these questions for synthetic entities designed to be unknown to the model. We find that LMs like Gemma-7B-IT frequently hallucinate, i.e., they have difficulty recognizing that the hallucinated fact is not part of their knowledge. Based on the idea of linear relational embeddings, we put forward the following hypothesis. (i) Due to the abstract scheme that is used to represent them, LMs can easily produce plausible objects for non-existing subjects of linear relations, which can lead to hallucinations. (ii) For a nonlinear relation, this mechanism for producing an object is not available and so a hallucination is easier to avoid. To test this hypothesis, we create SyntHal, a synthetic unknown-entity benchmark for 15 relations. We find that across four instruction-tuned models, relational linearity is a strong predictor of models hallucinating an object for an unknown subject vs refusing to give an answer, with correlations $r \in [.58, .84]$.

While Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) are rapidly advancing towards generalist robot policies, it remains difficult to quantitatively understand their limits and failure modes. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark called VLA-Arena. We propose a novel structured task design framework to quantify difficulty across three orthogonal axes: (1) Task Structure, (2) Language Command, and (3) Visual Observation. This allows us to systematically design tasks with fine-grained difficulty levels, enabling a precise measurement of model capability frontiers. For Task Structure, VLA-Arena's 170 tasks are grouped into four dimensions: Safety, Distractor, Extrapolation, and Long Horizon. Each task is designed with three difficulty levels (L0-L2), with fine-tuning performed exclusively on L0 to assess general capability. Orthogonal to this, language (W0-W4) and visual (V0-V4) perturbations can be applied to any task to enable a decoupled analysis of robustness. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art VLAs reveals several critical limitations, including a strong tendency toward memorization over generalization, asymmetric robustness, a lack of consideration for safety constraints, and an inability to compose learned skills for long-horizon tasks. To foster research addressing these challenges and ensure reproducibility, we provide the complete VLA-Arena framework, including an end-to-end toolchain from task definition to automated evaluation and the VLA-Arena-S/M/L datasets for fine-tuning. Our benchmark, data, models, and leaderboard are available at https://vla-arena.github.io.

With the popularity of drone technologies, aerial photography has become prevalent in many daily scenarios such as environment monitoring, structure inspection, law enforcement etc. A central challenge in this domain is the efficient coverage of a target area with photographs that can entirely capture the region, while respecting constraints such as the image resolution, and limited number of pictures that can be taken. This work investigates the computational complexity of covering a simple planar polygon using squares and circles. Specifically, it shows inapproximability gaps of $1.165$ (for squares) and $1.25$ (for restricted square centers) and develops a $2.828$-optimal approximation algorithm, demonstrating that these problems are computationally intractable to approximate. The intuitions of this work can extend beyond aerial photography to broader applications such as pesticide spraying and strategic sensor placement.

Imitation learning from human demonstrations has become a dominant approach for training autonomous robot policies. However, collecting demonstration datasets is costly: it often requires access to robots and needs sustained effort in a tedious, long process. These factors limit the scale of data available for training policies. We aim to address this scalability challenge by involving a broader audience in a gamified data collection experience that is both accessible and motivating. Specifically, we develop a gamified remote teleoperation platform, RoboCade, to engage general users in collecting data that is beneficial for downstream policy training. To do this, we embed gamification strategies into the design of the system interface and data collection tasks. In the system interface, we include components such as visual feedback, sound effects, goal visualizations, progress bars, leaderboards, and badges. We additionally propose principles for constructing gamified tasks that have overlapping structure with useful downstream target tasks. We instantiate RoboCade on three manipulation tasks -- including spatial arrangement, scanning, and insertion. To illustrate the viability of gamified robot data collection, we collect a demonstration dataset through our platform, and show that co-training robot policies with this data can improve success rate on non-gamified target tasks (+16-56%). Further, we conduct a user study to validate that novice users find the gamified platform significantly more enjoyable than a standard non-gamified platform (+24%). These results highlight the promise of gamified data collection as a scalable, accessible, and engaging method for collecting demonstration data.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been widely applied to reasoning tasks. However, they suffer from limited multi-rationale semantic modeling, insufficient logical robustness, and susceptibility to misleading cues. Therefore, we propose a Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative (MIND) reasoning framework, which is designed to endow MLLMs with human-like cognitive abilities of "Understand -> Rethink -> Correct", and achieves a paradigm evolution from passive imitation-based reasoning to active discriminative reasoning. Specifically, we introduce a Rationale Augmentation and Discrimination (RAD) paradigm, which provides a unified and extensible data foundation. Meanwhile, we design a Progressive Two-stage Correction Learning (P2CL) strategy. The first phase enhances multi-rationale positive learning, while the second phase enables active logic discrimination and correction. In addition, to mitigate representation entanglement in the multi-rationale semantic space, we propose a Multi-rationale Contrastive Alignment (MCA) optimization strategy. Extensive experiments show that our MIND achieves SOTA performance on multiple public datasets. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/MIND

We study timestamped question answering over educational lecture videos under a single-GPU latency/memory budget. Given a natural-language query, the system retrieves relevant timestamped segments and synthesizes a grounded answer. We present CourseTimeQA (52.3 h, 902 queries across six courses) and a lightweight, latency-constrained cross-modal retriever (CrossFusion-RAG) that combines frozen encoders, a learned 512->768 vision projection, shallow query-agnostic cross-attention over ASR and frames with a temporal-consistency regularizer, and a small cross-attentive reranker. On CourseTimeQA, CrossFusion-RAG improves nDCG@10 by 0.10 and MRR by 0.08 over a strong BLIP-2 retriever while achieving approximately 1.55 s median end-to-end latency on a single A100. Closest comparators (zero-shot CLIP multi-frame pooling; CLIP + cross-encoder reranker + MMR; learned late-fusion gating; text-only hybrid with cross-encoder reranking and its MMR variant; caption-augmented text retrieval; non-learned temporal smoothing) are evaluated under matched hardware and indexing. We report robustness across ASR noise (WER quartiles), diagnostics for temporal localization, and full training/tuning details to support reproducible comparison.

As large-scale multi-agent systems evolve, the communication protocol layer has become a critical yet under-evaluated factor shaping performance and reliability. Despite the existence of diverse protocols (A2A, ACP, ANP, Agora, etc.), selection is often intuition-driven and lacks standardized guidance. We introduce ProtocolBench, a benchmark that systematically compares agent protocols along four measurable axes: task success, end-to-end latency, message or byte overhead, and robustness under failures. On ProtocolBench, protocol choice significantly influences system behavior. In the Streaming Queue scenario, overall completion time varies by up to 36.5% across protocols, and mean end-to-end latency differs by 3.48 s. Under Fail-Storm Recovery, resilience also differs consistently across protocols. Beyond evaluation, we present ProtocolRouter, a learnable protocol router that selects per-scenario (or per-module) protocols from requirement and runtime signals. ProtocolRouter reduces Fail-Storm recovery time by up to 18.1% versus the best single-protocol baseline, and achieves scenario-specific gains such as higher success in GAIA. We also release ProtocolRouterBench to standardize protocol evaluation and improve reliability at scale.

Multi-hop reasoning for question answering (QA) plays a critical role in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for modern large language models (LLMs). The accurate answer can be obtained through retrieving relational structure of entities from knowledge graph (KG). Regarding the inherent relation-dependency and reasoning pattern, multi-hop reasoning can be in general classified into two categories: i) parallel fact-verification multi-hop reasoning question, i.e., requiring simultaneous verifications of multiple independent sub-questions; and ii) chained multi-hop reasoning questions, i.e., demanding sequential multi-step inference with intermediate conclusions serving as essential premises for subsequent reasoning. Currently, the multi-hop reasoning approaches singly employ one of two techniques: LLM response-based fact verification and KG path-based chain construction. Nevertheless, the former excels at parallel fact-verification but underperforms on chained reasoning tasks, while the latter demonstrates proficiency in chained multi-hop reasoning but suffers from redundant path retrieval when handling parallel fact-verification reasoning. These limitations deteriorate the efficiency and accuracy for multi-hop QA tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel dual-track KG verification and reasoning framework DTKG, which is inspired by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science. Specifically, DTKG comprises two main stages: the Classification Stage and the Branch Processing Stage.

This work demonstrates the possibilities for improving wildfire and air quality management in the western United States by leveraging the unprecedented hourly data from NASA's TEMPO satellite mission and advances in self-supervised deep learning. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for mapping the near real-time hourly spread of wildfire fronts and smoke plumes using an innovative self-supervised deep learning-system: successfully distinguishing smoke plumes from clouds using GOES-18 and TEMPO data, strong agreement across the smoke and fire masks generated from different sensing modalities as well as significant improvement over operational products for the same cases.

In recent years, the fusion of camera data with LiDAR measurements has emerged as a powerful approach to enhance spatial understanding. This study introduces a novel, hardware-agnostic methodology that generates colourised point clouds from mechanical LiDAR using multiple camera inputs, providing complete 360-degree coverage. The primary innovation lies in its robustness under low-light conditions, achieved through the integration of a low-light image enhancement module within the fusion pipeline. The system requires initial calibration to determine intrinsic camera parameters, followed by automatic computation of the geometric transformation between the LiDAR and cameras, removing the need for specialised calibration targets and streamlining the setup. The data processing framework uses colour correction to ensure uniformity across camera feeds before fusion. The algorithm was tested using a Velodyne Puck Hi-Res LiDAR and a four-camera configuration. The optimised software achieved real-time performance and reliable colourisation even under very low illumination, successfully recovering scene details that would otherwise remain undetectable.

Diffusion probability models have shown significant promise in offline reinforcement learning by directly modeling trajectory sequences. However, existing approaches primarily focus on time-domain features while overlooking frequency-domain features, leading to frequency shift and degraded performance according to our observation. In this paper, we investigate the RL problem from a new perspective of the frequency domain. We first observe that time-domain-only approaches inadvertently introduce shifts in the low-frequency components of the frequency domain, which results in trajectory instability and degraded performance. To address this issue, we propose Wavelet Fourier Diffuser (WFDiffuser), a novel diffusion-based RL framework that integrates Discrete Wavelet Transform to decompose trajectories into low- and high-frequency components. To further enhance diffusion modeling for each component, WFDiffuser employs Short-Time Fourier Transform and cross attention mechanisms to extract frequency-domain features and facilitate cross-frequency interaction. Extensive experiment results on the D4RL benchmark demonstrate that WFDiffuser effectively mitigates frequency shift, leading to smoother, more stable trajectories and improved decision-making performance over existing methods.

Motion estimation is a crucial component in multi-object tracking (MOT). It predicts the trajectory of objects by analyzing the changes in their positions in consecutive frames of images, reducing tracking failures and identity switches. The Kalman filter (KF) based on the linear constant-velocity model is one of the most commonly used methods in MOT. However, it may yield unsatisfactory results when KF's parameters are mismatched and objects move in non-stationary. In this work, we utilize the learning-aided filter to handle the motion estimation of MOT. In particular, we propose a novel method named Semantic-Independent KalmanNet (SIKNet), which encodes the state vector (the input feature) using a Semantic-Independent Encoder (SIE) by two steps. First, the SIE uses a 1D convolution with a kernel size of 1, which convolves along the dimension of homogeneous-semantic elements across different state vectors to encode independent semantic information. Then it employs a fully-connected layer and a nonlinear activation layer to encode nonlinear and cross-dependency information between heterogeneous-semantic elements. To independently evaluate the performance of the motion estimation module in MOT, we constructed a large-scale semi-simulated dataset from several open-source MOT datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIKNet outperforms the traditional KF and achieves superior robustness and accuracy than existing learning-aided filters. The code is available at (https://github.com/SongJgit/filternet and https://github.com/SongJgit/TBDTracker).

Despite significant progress in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), dataset biases and reliance on subjective labels continue to hinder their generalization performance. We propose HiRQA (Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment), a self-supervised, opinion-unaware framework that offers a hierarchical, quality-aware embedding through a combination of ranking and contrastive learning. Unlike prior approaches that depend on pristine references or auxiliary modalities at inference time, HiRQA predicts quality scores using only the input image. We introduce a novel higher-order ranking loss that supervises quality predictions through relational ordering across distortion pairs, along with an embedding distance loss that enforces consistency between feature distances and perceptual differences. A training-time contrastive alignment loss, guided by structured textual prompts, further enhances the learned representation. Trained only on synthetic image distortions, HiRQA generalizes to authentic degradations, as demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations on various unseen distortions such as lens flare, haze, motion blur, and low-light conditions. For real-time deployment, we introduce HiRQA-S, a lightweight variant with an inference time of only 3.5 ms per image. Extensive experiments across synthetic and authentic benchmarks validate HiRQA's competitive performance, strong generalization ability, and scalability. The HiRQA model and inference pipeline are available at: https://github.com/uf-robopi/HiRQA.